This book will challenge the orthodox view that children cannot have the same rights as adults because they are particularly vulnerable. It will argue that we should treat adults and children in the same way as the child liberationists claim. However, the basis of that claim is not that children are more competent than we traditionally given them credit for, but rather that adults are far less competent than we give them credit for. It is commonly assumed that children are more vulnerable. That is why we need to have a special legal regime for children. Children cannot have all the same rights as adults and need especial protect from harms. While in the 1970s "child liberationists" mounted a sustained challenge to this image, arguing that childhood was a form of slavery and that the assumption that children lacked capacity was unsustainable. This movement has significantly fallen out of favour, particularly given increasing awareness of child abuse and the multiple ways that children can be harmed at the hands of adults. This book will explore the concept of vulnerability, the way it used to undermine the interests of children and our assumptions that adults are not vulnerable in the same way that children are. It will argue that a law based around mutual vulnerability can provide an approach which avoids the need to distinguish adults and children.

With a new and comprehensive account of the South African Constitutional Court's social rights decisions, Brian Ray argues that the Court's procedural enforcement approach has had significant but underappreciated effects on law and policy, and challenges the view that a stronger substantive standard of review is necessary to realize these rights. Drawing connections between the Court's widely acclaimed early decisions and the more recent second-wave cases, Ray explains that the Court has responded to the democratic legitimacy and institutional competence concerns that consistently constrain it by developing doctrines and remedial techniques that enable activists, civil society and local communities to press directly for rights-protective policies through structured, court-managed engagement processes. Engaging with Social Rights shows how those tools could be developed to make state institutions responsive to the needs of poor communities by giving those communities and their advocates consistent access to policy-making and planning processes.

Written by leading experts, Nationality and Statelessness under International Law introduces the study and practice of 'international statelessness law' and explains the complex relationship between the international law on nationality and the phenomenon of statelessness. It also identifies the rights of stateless people, outlines the major legal obstacles preventing the eradication of statelessness and charts a course for this new and rapidly changing field of study. All royalties from the sale of this book support stateless projects.

To have a nationality is a human right. But between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, virtually every country in the world adopted laws that stripped citizenship from women who married foreign men. Despite the resulting hardships and even statelessness experienced by married women, it took until 1957 for the international community to condemn the practice, with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Nationality of Married Women. Citizenship, Alienage, and the Modern Constitutional State tells the important yet neglected story of marital denaturalization from a comparative perspective. Examining denaturalization laws and their impact on women around the world, with a focus on Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States, it advances a concept of citizenship as profoundly personal and existential. In doing so, it sheds light on both a specific chapter of legal history and the theory of citizenship in general.

Affirmative action has been and continues to be a volatile, complex, and hotly debated issue. In this volume, Ronald Turner provides a comprehensive resource and guide through the maze of preferential treatment doctrine, U.S. Supreme Court decisions relating to affirmative action, and agency regulations and practices. Rather than focus on the moral or constitutional issues involved, Turner seeks to provide an objective analysis of the evolution of the legal concept of affirmative action--to describe what the law has actually meant in practice rather than judge whether affirmative action is either right or wrong, constitutional or unconstitutional. To this end, Turner defines and examines what affirmative action was in the early 1970s when the concept was first enshrined in law and explores how the Supreme Court is now interpreting the concept. He also discusses cases involving set-aside programs and analyzes other federal and state government programs in which constitutional principles and Executive Orders remain untouched by the Supreme Court's recent conservative rulings.

Following an introductory chapter in which he reviews the basic issues involved in the affirmative action debate, Turner discusses the origins and development of the affirmative action concept. He then examines affirmative action in the employment jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court and the application of the Court's rulings by the lower courts in selected cases. The requirements of Executive Order 11246 and its implementing regulations and the impact of the order on federal contractors are detailed in a separate chapter. Turner also offers a brief treatment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's affirmative action guidelines. Finally, the author explores the judicial review of minority and women business enterprise programs, with particular emphasis on the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling which invalidated a minority business enterprise statute enacted by the City of Richmond, Virginia. By thoroughly analyzing the record of the courts and legislative and administrative initiatives in affirmative action, this book offers guidelines and information which will be invaluable to all segments of the labor management community involved in and responsible for affirmative action and preferential treatment of minorities and women.

In recent years, the UN Human Rights Council has approved the 'Respect, Protect, and Remedy' Framework and endorsed the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These developments have been welcomed widely, but do they adequately address the challenges concerning the human rights obligations of business? This volume of essays engages critically with these important developments. The chapters revolve around four key issues: the process and methodology adopted in arriving at these documents; the source and justification of corporate human rights obligations; the nature and extent of such obligations; and the implementation and enforcement thereof. In addition to highlighting several critical deficits in these documents, the contributing authors also outline a vision for the twenty-first century in which companies have obligations to society that go beyond the responsibility to respect human rights.

About one-third of the world's population currently lives under pluri-legal systems where governments hold individuals subject to the purview of ethno-religious rather than national norms in respect to family law. How does the state-enforcement of these religious family laws impact fundamental rights and liberties? What resistance strategies do people employ in order to overcome the disabilities and limitations these religious laws impose upon their rights? Based on archival research, court observations and interviews with individuals from three countries, Yuksel Sezgin shows that governments have often intervened in order to impress a particular image of subjectivity upon a society, while people have constantly challenged the interpretive monopoly of courts and state-sanctioned religious institutions, re-negotiated their rights and duties under the law, and changed the system from within. He also identifies key lessons and best practices for the integration of universal human rights principles into religious legal systems."

Much has been written on the Argentine dictatorship and the transitional justice movement that brought its members to justice. However there has been no study to date of the economic accomplices to this dictatorship and the recent advancements in Argentina towards holding these actors accountable. What was the role of banks, companies, and individuals in perpetuating a murderous regime? To what extent should they be held responsible? As the first academic study on economic complicity in Argentina, this book attempts to answer these questions. Renowned human rights scholars investigate the role played by such actors as Ford, Mercedes Benz, the press, foreign banks, and even the Catholic Church. Across numerous case studies, the authors make a compelling argument for the legal responsibility of economic accomplices. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, this book will be essential to anyone interested in transitional justice, business, and human rights.

This book reconceptualizes the history of US immigration and citizenship law from the colonial period to the beginning of the twenty-first century by joining the histories of immigrants to those of Native Americans, African Americans, women, Asian Americans, Latino/a Americans and the poor. Parker argues that during the earliest stages of American history, being legally constructed as a foreigner, along with being subjected to restrictions on presence and movement, was not confined to those who sought to enter the country from the outside, but was also used against those on the inside. Insiders thus shared important legal disabilities with outsiders. It is only over the course of four centuries, with the spread of formal and substantive citizenship among the domestic population, a hardening distinction between citizen and alien, and the rise of a powerful centralized state, that the uniquely disabled legal subject we recognize today as the immigrant has emerged.

This book reconceptualizes the history of US immigration and citizenship law from the colonial period to the beginning of the twenty-first century by joining the histories of immigrants to those of Native Americans, African Americans, women, Asian Americans, Latino/a Americans and the poor. Parker argues that during the earliest stages of American history, being legally constructed as a foreigner, along with being subjected to restrictions on presence and movement, was not confined to those who sought to enter the country from the outside, but was also used against those on the inside. Insiders thus shared important legal disabilities with outsiders. It is only over the course of four centuries, with the spread of formal and substantive citizenship among the domestic population, a hardening distinction between citizen and alien, and the rise of a powerful centralized state, that the uniquely disabled legal subject we recognize today as the immigrant has emerged.

The Nordic countries are well known globally for their high human rights standards and, at the same time, high degree of internet freedom. This edited collection reveals how the Nordic countries have succeeded in the task of protecting freedom of expression in the new media. It contains an overview of public policy choices and best practices of domestic online companies, which have the aspiration of finding global acceptance. Reviewing the topic of freedom of expression in new media within Nordic and Baltic countries, this book incorporates both general themes and interesting country-specific themes that will provide wider knowledge on the development of freedom of expression and media law in the online media era. A comprehensive analysis of regulation of online media, both at the level of legislation and application of law in courts and other authorities, are included. This book will contribute to the ongoing discussion as to whether there is a need to modify prevailing interpretation of freedom of expression. Human Rights Law and Regulating Freedom of Expression in New Media focuses on the multi-layered and complicated relationship between internet and human rights law. It contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding the protection of freedom of expression on the internet in the context of various doctrines of constitutional law, including the proliferation of constitutional adjudication. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students in the fields of human rights law, internet law, political science, sociology, cultural studies, media and communications studies and technology.

The US led programme of extraordinary rendition created profound challenges for the international system of human rights protection and rule of law. This book examines the efforts of authorities in Europe and the US to re-establish rule of law and respect for human rights through the investigation of the program and its outcomes. The contributions to this volume examine the supranational and national inquiries into the US CIA-led extraordinary rendition and secret detention programme in Europe. The book takes as a starting point two recent and far-reaching developments in delivering accountability and establishing the truth: First, the publication of the executive summary of the US Senate Intelligence Committee (Feinstein) Report, and second, various European Court of Human Rights judgments regarding the complicity of several state parties and the incompatibility of those actions with the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). The collective volume provides the first stock-taking review of the state of affairs in the quest for accountability, and identifies significant obstacles in going even further -- as international law demands. It will be vital reading for students and scholars in a wide range of areas, including international relations, international law, public policy and counter-terrorism studies.

This book provides a thorough legal analysis of the United States Migrant Interdiction Program, examining the United States' compliance with its obligations under municipal and international law as it interdicts individuals at sea, conducts status determinations, and returns those interdicted to their home countries. This book also examines the rights of the small number of refugees and individuals at risk of torture detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, awaiting resettlement in third countries. Policy-makers, students and scholars will benefit from this book's clarification of the legal obligations of nations engaged in extraterritorial status determination and detention, as well as its blueprint for compliance with international human rights and refugee law. As the first book of its kind devoted to the United States' interdiction program, this work represents an important contribution to scholarship in refugee law and policy, US constitutional law, international maritime law, and international human rights law.

The work at hand for bridging the racial divide in the United States From Baltimore and Ferguson to Flint and Charleston, the dream of a post-racial era in America has run up against the continuing reality of racial antagonism. Current debates about affirmative action, multiculturalism, and racial hate speech reveal persistent uncertainty and ambivalence about the place and meaning of race - and especially the black/white divide - in American culture. They also suggest that the work of racial reconciliation remains incomplete. Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation seeks to assess where we are in that work, examining sources of continuing racial antagonism among blacks and whites. It also highlights strategies that promise to promote racial reconciliation in the future. Rather than revisit arguments about the importance of integration, assimilation, and reparations, the contributors explore previously unconsidered perspectives on reconciliation between blacks and whites. Chapters connect identity politics, the rhetoric of race and difference, the work of institutions and actors in those institutions, and structural inequities in the lives of blacks and whites to our thinking about tolerance and respect. Going beyond an assessment of the capacity of law to facilitate racial reconciliation, Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation challenges readers to examine social, political, cultural, and psychological issues that fuel racial antagonism, as well as the factors that might facilitate racial reconciliation.

This examination of Palestinian experiences of life and death within the context of Israeli settler colonialism broadens the analytical horizon to include those who 'keep on existing' and explores how Israeli theologies and ideologies of security, surveillance and fear can obscure violence and power dynamics while perpetuating existing power structures. Drawing from everyday aspects of Palestinian victimization, survival, life and death, and moving between the local and the global, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduces and defines her notion of 'Israeli security theology' and the politics of fear within Palestine/Israel. She relies on a feminist analysis, invoking the intimate politics of the everyday and centering the Palestinian body, family life, memory and memorialization, birth and death as critical sites from which to examine the settler colonial state's machineries of surveillance which produce and maintain a political economy of fear that justifies colonial violence.

Contrary to popular assumption, the development of stronger oversight mechanisms actually leads to greater secrecy rather than the reverse. When Should State Secrets Stay Secret? examines modern trends in intelligence oversight development by focusing on how American oversight mechanisms combine to bolster an internal security system and thus increase the secrecy of the intelligence enterprise. Genevieve Lester uniquely examines how these oversight mechanisms have developed within all three branches of government, how they interact, and what types of historical pivot points have driven change among them. She disaggregates the concept of accountability into a series of specified criteria in order to grapple with these pivot points. This book concludes with a discussion of a series of normative questions, suggesting ways to improve oversight mechanisms based on the analytical criteria laid out in the analysis. It also includes a chapter on the workings of the CIA to which a number of CIA officers contributed.

Contrary to popular assumption, the development of stronger oversight mechanisms actually leads to greater secrecy rather than the reverse. When Should State Secrets Stay Secret? examines modern trends in intelligence oversight development by focusing on how American oversight mechanisms combine to bolster an internal security system and thus increase the secrecy of the intelligence enterprise. Genevieve Lester uniquely examines how these oversight mechanisms have developed within all three branches of government, how they interact, and what types of historical pivot points have driven change among them. She disaggregates the concept of accountability into a series of specified criteria in order to grapple with these pivot points. This book concludes with a discussion of a series of normative questions, suggesting ways to improve oversight mechanisms based on the analytical criteria laid out in the analysis. It also includes a chapter on the workings of the CIA to which a number of CIA officers contributed.

Archbishop Stephen Langton hoped with Magna Carta to realise an Old Testament, covenantal kingship in England. At the Charter's 800th anniversary, distinguished jurists, theologians and historians from five faith-traditions and three continents ask how Magna Carta's biblical foundations have mattered and still matter now. A Lord Chief Justice, a Chief Rabbi, a Grand Mufti of Egypt, specialists in eight centuries of law, scholars and advocates committed to the rule of law and to the place of religion in public life all come together in this testimony to Magna Carta's iconic power. We follow the Charter's story in the religious life of the UK, America and now Continental Europe, and reflections on religio-legal traditions far from the Common Law enrich the story. Magna Carta, Religion and the Rule of Law invites all religions to ask what contribution they themselves should make to the rule of law in today's secular, democratic polities.

Voting rights are a perennial topic in American politics. Recent elections and the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down key enforcement provisions in the Voting Rights Act (VRA), have only placed further emphasis on the debate over voter disenfranchaisement. Over the past five decades, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have consistently voted to expand the protections offered to vulnerable voters by the Voting Rights Act. And yet, the administration of the VRA has become more fragmented and judicial interpretation of its terms has become much less generous. Why have Republicans consistently adopted administrative and judicial decisions that undermine legislation they repeatedly endorse? Ballot Blocked shows how the divergent trajectories of legislation, administration, and judicial interpretation in voting rights policymaking derive largely from efforts by conservative politicians to narrow the scope of federal enforcement while at the same time preserving their public reputations as supporters of racial equality and minority voting rights. Jesse H. Rhodes argues that conservatives adopt a paradoxical strategy in which they acquiesce to expansive voting rights protections in Congress (where decisions are visible and easily traceable) while simultaneously narrowing the scope of federal enforcement via administrative and judicial maneuvers (which are less visible and harder to trace). Over time, the repeated execution of this strategy has enabled a conservative Supreme Court to exercise preponderant influence over the scope of federal enforcement.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have generated tremendous discussion in global policy and academic circles. On the one hand, they have been hailed as the most important initiative ever in international development. On the other hand, they have been described as a great betrayal of human rights and universal values that has contributed to a depoliticization of development. With contributions from scholars from the fields of economics, law, politics, medicine and architecture, this volume sets out to disentangle this debate in both theory and practice. It critically examines the trajectory of the MDGs, the role of human rights in theory and practice, and what criteria might guide the framing of the post-2015 development agenda. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in global agreements on poverty and development.

Advocates within the growing field of children's rights have designed dynamic campaigns to protect and promote children's rights. This expanding body of international law and jurisprudence, however, lacks a core text that provides an up-to-date look at current children's rights issues, the evolution of children's rights law, and the efficacy of efforts to protect children. Campaigning for Children focuses on contemporary children's rights, identifying the range of abuses that affect children today, including early marriage, female genital mutilation, child labor, child sex tourism, corporal punishment, the impact of armed conflict, and access to education. Jo Becker traces the last 25 years of the children's rights movement, including the evolution of international laws and standards to protect children from abuse and exploitation. From a practitioner's perspective, Becker provides readers with careful case studies of the organizations and campaigns that are making a difference in the lives of children, and the relevant strategies that have been successful-or not. By presenting a variety of approaches to deal with each issue, this book carefully teases out broader lessons for effective social change in the field of children's rights.

Both New Zealand and the United Kingdom challenge assumptions about how a bill of rights functions. Their parliamentary bills of rights constrain judicial review and also look to parliament to play a rights-protecting role. This arises from the requirement to inform parliament if legislative bills are not compatible with rights. But are these bills of rights operating in this proactive manner? Are governments encountering significantly stronger pressures to ensure legislation complies with rights? Are these bills of rights resulting in more reasoned deliberations in parliament about the justification of legislation from a rights perspective? Through extensive interviews with public officials and analysis of parliamentary debates where questions of compliance with rights arise (prisoner voting, parole and sentencing policy, counter-terrorism legislation, and same-sex marriage), this book argues that a serious gap exists between the promise of these bills of rights and the institutional variables that influence how these parliaments function.

More than twenty years after the fall of communism, many countries in Central and Eastern Europe are still seeking truth and justice for the repression suffered under communist rule. This search has been particularly notable in the Baltic states, given the three countries' histories as both former Soviet republics and later member-states of the European Union. On the one hand, the legacy of Stalinist oppression was more severe in these countries than elsewhere in Central Europe, but on the other hand much of this past could more easily be externalized onto the former Soviet Union (and by extension Russia) following re-independence. Transitional and Retrospective Justice in the Baltic States develops a novel conceptual framework in order to understand the politics involved with transitional and retrospective justice, and then applies this outline to the Baltic states to analyze more systematic patterns of truth- and justice-seeking in the post-communist world.

The Poverty of Privacy Rights makes a simple, controversial argument: Poor mothers in America have been deprived of the right to privacy. The U.S. Constitution is supposed to bestow rights equally. Yet the poor are subject to invasions of privacy that can be perceived as gross demonstrations of governmental power without limits. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality of privacy invasions on the poor, and legal scholars typically understand marginalized populations to have "weak versions" of the privacy rights everyone else enjoys. Khiara M. Bridges investigates poor mothers' experiences with the state-both when they receive public assistance and when they do not. Presenting a holistic view of just how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers' privacy, Bridges shows how the Constitution has not been interpreted to bestow these women with family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Bridges seeks to turn popular thinking on its head: Poor mothers' lack of privacy is not a function of their reliance on government assistance-rather it is a function of their not bearing any privacy rights in the first place. Until we disrupt the cultural narratives that equate poverty with immorality, poor mothers will continue to be denied this right.

The laws governing humanitarian action stand at the intersection of several fields of international law, regional agreements, soft law and domestic law. Through in-depth case studies and analysis, expert scholars and practitioners come together to offer an interdisciplinary approach, which includes contributions from legal policy, international relations and philosophical perspectives. Providing invaluable overviews and insights, this collection of essays sheds light on the subject and makes sense of the various elements involved to elucidate the foundations of the different approaches by the different levels of humanitarian law and policy.